In our June 2022 sale of Important Irish Art, Adam's is delighted to offer two rediscovered masterworks by William Ashford, a pair of paintings showing Dublin Bay looking north and south. These are extraordinarily important paintings from both historical and artistic points of view and, without doubt, the most important eighteenth-century Irish landscapes to come to market for many decades.
Given their significance, we have taken the unusual step of dedicating a stand-alone catalogue to the Dublin Bay views. Adam's is grateful to Michael Branagan and William Laffan for contributing essays to this volume.
Ashford, who decades after he painted these pictures, would become the first president of the Royal Hibernian Academy, is one of the key figures in Irish art history while perhaps the only works of comparable topographical significance in the corpus of Irish art are Ashford’s own View from Phoenix Park in the National Gallery of Ireland, Joseph Tudor’s view of the city from the same angle (private collection) and John Butts’s View of Cork (Crawford Art Gallery, Cork).
The pictures were first sold almost two hundred and fifty years ago at Christie’s, in its original home in London’s Pall Mall, with its legendary founder James Christie at the rostrum. They have been lost sight of in the intervening centuries with their authorship by William Ashford and their subject, Dublin Bay, forgotten.
Adam's is proud to re-present these works of immense national importance to the public and the scholarly community alike.